So an idea for an adventure occurred to me today while walking home, though I have to admit its based on a character from Snow Crash. Kudos if you know who!

So in the Imperium, atomic weapons are under a blanket ban, I don't think they even use them during Exterminatus. But they do still exist, hidden away in ancient armories and hoarded by those who possess them. So my idea is; a forgeworld with an ancient store of them is overrun by an Ork WAAAGH. And the orks found the hidden silo, deep beneath the earth, with ancient and potent defenses, encrusted with warnings and admonitions to beware for a fell machine spirit rested here. And the orks overcame the defenses and cracked the mighty vault doors, because anything so well protected and hidden had to be worth its weight in teef.

So the nob in charge finally realized what they'd found, and dispatched the other boyz to seize it for himself. Then, he makes a painboy, under pain (ha ha) of death, to insert a life monitor inside his chest, and paid a mekboy to wire the weapon to blow if his lifesigns ceased, as well as booby trapping the weapon. Finally, he has the mekboy build him a massive warbike, with the warhead laid on the back, extending down the body, so that he straddles bomb to ride it. And with the insane weapon at his command, he grows massive with truculence and the fearful loyalty of mobz of boyz flocking to his banner. He is rallying the dispersed forces of the Waagh that conquered the forgeworld together, into a new Waaagh, to go forth among the stars and BLOW SOMTHIN' UP!!!

Meet Gazog da Mad Bomma, Warboss of a nascent Waaagh, and rider and wielder of Da Big One, his nuclear warhead/massive warbike. If he loses his life, the warhead will detonate, killing everything for miles around. The Imperium is looking to get its forge world back, and is pissed at the Mechanicus for having let a forbidden atomic fall into ork hands. But the problem gets worse. Besides the deadman's switch attached to Gazog's heart, and the massive red button on his bike for deliberate detonation, the ancient device is leaking radiation, which is mutating Gazog, causing him to grow even larger and faster than normal for an orc of his position. Its also killing him with radiation poisoning, causing his hair and teef to fall out. Gazog was mad about that, but has had them replaced with adamantium teef, courteous of another painboy. Its also driving him insane, even for an ork. It is only a matter of time before the radiation either kills Gazog and detonates the device, or he, in his madness, sets it off himself.

On top of that, an even greater problem looms. The atomic in question is massive, ancient and incredibly powerful. It is actually a multiple warhead device, encased in a superhardened casing. This means the atomic is many times more powerful than even a normal weapon of its type. In fact, it is of a totally forbidden and archaeotech mark of weapon, colloquially known as a 'planet cracker'. The forge world is already geologically unstable from the ancient mining works and geothermal power exploitation. The detonation of the weapon on the planet would be more than enough to destroy the entire planet. A forge world in xenos hands is bad. An annihilated forge world is infinitely worse. The forces necessary to retake the planet are already being assembled, but it will all be meaningless of Gazog destroys the planet, intentionally or not.

The Kill-Team is ordered to insert covertly onto the planet, with their primary objective being to find Gazog's growing horde, infiltrate their base camp, and locate Gazog's bike. Their orders are for their Tech-Priest (adding an NPC one if none are already in the Kill-Team) to disable the weapon, or at least the detonator, so it is made safe. Their other primary objective is to assassinate Gazog once their first objective is complete. Secondary objectives could be scouting out the ork's strength for the coming assault, as well as sabotaging targets of interest, such as refineries and airfields, and assassinating other ork warlords and specialists. Another secondary objective is to, if possible, recover the weapon via teleportarium beacon extraction. Tertiary objectives could be Mechanicus requests to recover certain personnel, artifacts and data on the planet, as well as helping whatever native resistance is still in play. Finding Gazog and his horde isn't a simple task, as he has many Speed Freak followers, and they are on vast, motorized crusade to sweep up all the remaining orks on the planet into their horde, then prepare to leave the planet. Sneaking in to the camp will also not be a walk in the park.

The crescendo if the mission will be sneaking into the heart of an ork horde basecamp to get to the Da Big One, and giving the techmarine time to disable it. Not sure what complications from there would be the most fun. Having Gazog be alerted by one of his booby traps, so that the rest of the team has to fight Gazog and his nobz, while protecting the Tech-Marine, and taking care not to kill Gazog before the deadman's switch is disabled. Then, trying to escape the planet once their mission is complete, after they've stirred up a horde of orks.

Fun complication ideas!

-Someone accidentally mortally wounds Gazog, and the Apothecary has to save the beast's life, at least long enough to defuse the weapon.

-The Tech-Marine has angered the weapon's machine spirit, and now a timer has activated, counting down to detonation. The team has to either disable it, or attach the teleportarium beacon and instruct the ship in orbit to teleport the bomb into space, where it can explode harmlessly.

"Well, this is it orks, toe to toe in NOU-CLEAR COMBAT with the Ummies. I expect some of you orks have got some pretty strong feelins about NOU-CLEAR COMBAT!"

Dr Strangelove is one of my all time favourite movies, thanks for the new spin.

YEEEEEEE HAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

So in the Imperium, atomic weapons are under a blanket ban, I don't think they even use them during Exterminatus.

Actually, atomic weapons are an option for ship weapons in Rogue Trader (Into The Storm, pg 163). The reason they don't get mentioned much is that the Imperium has much more powerful weapons.

Atomics aren't used for Exterminatus because they aren't powerful enough. The standard method involves a single powerful warhead, not the thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of atomics needed to ensure that everything dies.

Also, nukes aren't like a block of chemical explosive. Building them so that they go off when you want them to is very tricky, requiring lots of precise construction. If this gets damaged, the nuke won't go off. What this means is that if one of your players applies their real life knowledge and decides to shoot it, even with a plasma or melta weapon, they aren't going to be setting it off. Instead, they will either do nothing or, should their shots penetrate the armour, they will damage it to a point that it will not initiate properly. So when the Ork decides to set it off, he will get an explosion* that spreads radioactive material around, not a nuclear event.

*The only nuke designs I'm aware of use chemical explosives to compress the uranium/plutonium to the point it goes critical. To do this the chemical explosives must create a very spherical shockwave to compress it evenly. No even compression means no nuclear explosion. So the only explosion is the chemical explosives going off.

tl/dr: Shooting holes in the nuke will disarm it.

Then there is the radiation issue. If it is radioactive enough to cause an Ork problems, despite their tough physiology, then you are talking about something with a shorter half life. Meaning players may use RL knowledge to argue that the bomb has lost too much radioactive material to work. If you want a long enough half-life to keep the weapon viable, you aren't getting much radiation from it. Sure, we are talking about Orks here, meaning they will boost its viability. But the "red wunz go faster" effect (I blame the warp) is a small one and would also help protect the Ork against the radiation if they believe they are too tough for it to hurt them.

My suggestion: Use an anti-matter warhead instead. Putting holes in it will set it off and you won't have any annoying questions about half-lives. You lose the radiation killing the mekboy, but the radiation only gives players a reason to hurry, which you can replace with a different reason, like the Orks being nearly ready to launch a WAAGH fleet.

Ah, but this is a universe with giant, genetically-enhanced super soldiers. And warp travel. And teleportation, and skyscraper-sized walking mechs, and psychics...

The good thing about having such crazy tech and science is that you can always say the Imperium's old nukes just work a bit differently than ours. They could have easily been constructed in a different way to make them more durable, not to mention having a different method of setting them off. They might even use an entirely unknown (to us) element for the reaction. If the team tries to bring real-world logic into things and pushes things, you can always say you'll change the game to be more realistic. That's when you take their character sheets away and go play a game of checkers.

I actually laughed when I read the part about the atomic bomb bike ... so orkish.

I keep thinking tho, that the thinking man's solution would be to lure the Waagh off world (which ultimately, is what they are planning to do anyway... so how hard could it be? Throw a challenge to the warboss about some huge fight two planet over or something - Ork love krumping space marines after all) and then take the battle to space... where carrying an large, unstable and (relatively) fragile atomic device in your capital ship is a pretty big drawback.

Bil wrote my post for me, so I don't have to.

It's a really good idea, but needs a tweak or two. Anti-matter or something would solve that, as it then becomes a matter of 'don't shoot it, or it will break the containment', rather than 'shoot it and break it'.

Maybe it's a powerful anti-matter warhead whose containment is being powered by a small atomic reactor, which is leaking?

Isn't there something in the Ork Lore that says technology behaves how orks believe it will behave? due to their innate psychic field? Because if so then if the Ork's believe it will go off it will go off

But seriously I think its a great adventure idea. I don't think that you really need to explain the Bombs mechanism to the PC's. just say its a really big bomb that will destroy the planet. The Mechanicus sure as hell wouldn't want your average space marine knowing how such a bomb works. So it doesn't matter too much whether it's atomic or antimatter or a miniaturised cyclonic torpedo or a box built by the Emperor himself and charged with His psychic power that will rush out with explosive force if breached, or even a box of kittens. If the space marines are ordered to go get it and ordered not to let it get damaged then they should do so more or less without question. thats hypnoindoctrination for you

Narkasis Broon said:

But are they alive or dead?

Siranui said:

It's 40k. They're dead. And probably mutants possessed by daemons.

As for the bomb being unrealistic or unfeasible...I do believe we are still talking about the universe in which genetically enhanced, power armored super soldiers fight with swords and shields, starship combat is often won by boarding actions, and the spaceships, in defiance of all logic, are run by slave labor.

Realism went out the door some time ago.

Its a nuke of ancient human manufacture, so Ork tek rules wouldn't apply to it. It's mostly a handwave to explain why the bomb is so powerful it can destroy the planet, or at least render it uninhabitable.

Though the Mechanicus might not want the average Space Marine knowing how atomics work, thats why they have a Tech-Marine along, someone with the skills and trusted enough to be given the knowledge.

If you don't like my excuse for it leaking radiation, we can always say the weapon vault it was in was dumping ground for atomic technology, including conventional reactor materials. These leaked over the millennia and have contaminated the bomb's casing. The casing is "superhardened", because there was a one off line in a Halo novel that explained a nuclear bomb case is superhardened to contain the blast for a micro second, letting it build to be more powerful. Also explains why they don't just bombard the orks from orbit to destroy the bomb and Gazog; no guarantee that would destroy the weapon, guaranteed to kill Gazog and detonate it.

It doesn't have to be in any way 'realistic' from a realism point of view for the reasons you state, but it does need to be sufficiently divorced from 'our' reality that players won't try to deliberately or accidently try to use 'real world' logic on it.

If I said 'nuclear weapon' to my party, they'd start thinking in 'real world' terms, and one of them would probably put a burst of bolter fire into it to disable it, while the others all started thinking about it in other real-world terms as regards leakage, disarming et al. Whereas if I said 'an uberonium tectonic-cracking warhead' they'd just follow the mission brief without another query! Sometimes you have to bring plot-lines close to home for them to be embraced, and sometimes you need to completely disconnect them.

True enough. Could always turn it around and say its an uber dirty forbidden atomic, which could irradiate the entire planet so much as to render it uninhabitable. Part of the appeal of 40k, at least for me, is the "close but so very far away" nature of the society and terminology. Besides just the fun alternate terms for everything, there is also the way culture is magnfified and distorted. Many people act today as if machines do have spirits and can be cajoled or threatened into operation, even though they know it isn't the case. Give it a thousand years of linguistic drift and growing ignorance, and you'd have people who literally believe that.

As to atomics being taboo in 40k, I'm aware the rules are presented in RT for atomic weapons, but generally the phrase you run into in 40k is "forbidden atomics", and they are not widely used. The inhabitants of the Imperium seem to possess a mythological dread of such weapons, probably as the result of some atomic catastrophe on ancient Terra. Thus, there forbidden nature today. Granted, this is the same society with access to virus bombs and cyclonic weapons, capable of reducing every living thing on a planet to a toxic slurry or literally cracking a planet in half, so just why they dread atomic weapons is sort of unexplained.

Da Warboss said:

Always seemed self explanatory to me.

If Atomic Weapon are by and large, not powerful enough to perform Exterminatus (i.e. Killing a planet), than the only possible use for them is tactically.

If the only possible use for them is tactically, it means you have to deal with the radiation and fall out.

The Imperium is all about numbers... it has countless people - so it needs countless place to put them in. It has countless armies, but it needs countless resource to keep them going. Winning a battle but making part of the newly conquered planet unlivable in or part of the machinery/resource unusable because of radiation is just a bad thing for them.

Hence the 'ban' on atomic weaponry - if using something is always a bad idea and there's always a better option... just forbid it so no idiot ever get a bright idea.

It's not so much a problem for Rogue Traders using it for battle in ship combat, for obvious reasons.

Da Warboss said:

I'm not sure how large someone could make a nuke that would still reliably go off. And even if you could, it would be very huge and heavy. Antimatter lets you have a larger boom with the same mass of material. With 40k forcefields, you could probably compress that mass of anti-matter into a smaller volume (with the field generators on the outside). Then get some anti-grav tech to lift it. So with minimal handwaving, you can have an anti-matter weapon powerful enough to blow off most of the atmosphere.

Instead of the radiation killing the Ork, you could have auspex scans that, when looked over by ad-mech, say that the forcefield is dangerously unstable and could fail at any moment. Or you could have him irradiated by something else, for example the previous team sent it to stop him were using radioactive rounds and you have proof that they shot him and he hasn't removed the bullets.

Or he could have got hold of a really large vortex warhead. One that is so large that its core is an open hole into the warp, with leaky containment that is harming the Ork and occasionally spiting out daemons. If it goes off, it drags a large chunk of the planet into the warp. In the briefing, the Ad-mech only told the players that they were to recover the warhead undamaged. It could be because they want to study it, it could be that If it gets seriously damaged, it will create a smaller vortex. Unfortunately this vortex is also less stable, meaning it will be an opening that lets daemons in. Probably both

Bilateralrope said:

See here for more on that topic

But I agree with the big vortex warhead, it sounds much more 40k-ish. And involves less strange handwaving (the Tsar Bomba would have more or less destroyed an area like Paris, so let's say the damages are really important in 50 kms around the center of the explosion...Not enough to really blow up a planet). You could even say that this vortex warhead dates from looooooooooong ago and it uses atomics to initiate the detonation. Then you have the coolness of radiation poisoning with the real dangerosity of a vortex bomb.

I like your idea, just don't use the name atomics. Everything as it is but it's an ancient devcice that the mechamicus has banned. The tech-marine will do all sorts of rolls, repeat that and say its something that should not be activated. Describe the bomb up tothe nurgle-like signs on the sides, draw a stylized-not-really-perceptible I.C.B.M on the side but never say atomics/nuclear.

Keep it ignorant and superstitious.

Isidro

He's an Ork. If he thinks the bike will blow up and destroy the planet when he dies, it probably will.

Your plot idea made me laugh out loud, and the reference to Dr. Strangelove brought a smile to my face.

Funny - the Strangelove reference in the title was good, but when I read the OP, the first thing I thought of was the biker lord Raven from Snow Crash.

Definitely using this idea for my Death Watch campaign. The Ork Warboss Skarlk Head Tearer is known for being cunnin and vicious in equal measure and this would fit right alongside his mindset.

The_Glyphstone said:

You are actually both correct; Raven is the character concept, and the thread name is from Dr. Strangelove.

+1 Pop Culture Reference points for both of you!

So ******* happy no one beat me to this: He's got space dementia!